By Rosy Brown, Book Club Leader
As you start your first term or return to begin another academic year, September arrives with its signature resolutions: immerse myself in the city’s culture, join a society, complete every assignment early. While these are all commendable aspirations, there is one habit I wish I hadn’t let fall to the wayside in the rush to embrace university life: reading for pleasure.
Just when it becomes trickier to ask home for advice, we tend to put down history’s most successful instrument for compassion. Just as we enter a new environment, full of strangers, we seem to desert our pocket companions. And just as we attempt to start afresh, to build ourselves anew amongst new peers, we discard our best mirror. As Marcel Proust wrote: ‘every reader finds himself. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.’
That’s why this year Epigram are launching our very own Book Club! Since the carnage associated with Freshers’ Week can hardly be expected to fill you with the sort of ennui that seeks escape in a classic opus, our very first recommendation, The Good Eye by Jess Gibson, is a punchy, fast-paced debut collection of short stories that you can pick up over a drowsy mcmuffin and put down before pres.
The collection, which came out in May, contains 12 compelling, snappy stories diving deep into the human psyche – sometimes skimming the fantastical – to explore themes of obsession, aging, infidelity, and hiring an animal medium to deal with the rat infestation in your garden. Gibson commands complete control of the uncanny, beguiling, and delightfully disquieting atmosphere she creates. With so much packed into such a narrow spine, every detail feels incredibly deliberate.
The story is so seductive because of the success of its kaleidoscopic tone. Moments of warmth and light are simultaneously coloured by a continual sense of cold foreboding. Its reader must come equipped with both their good eye and their bad.
My personal favorite story was a twisted and characteristically ambiguous third-person narrative titled ‘Intake’, which explores the dehumanisation that comes with getting old. It follows Fiona, a weekend carer for an elderly lady named Ms. Seabright. As the story unfolds, Fiona discovers that Hannah Seabright, now close to immobile and mute, was once a successful and passionate chef. Her daughter remembers her saying she would ‘rather go Hungry than eat bad food.’ For dinner now, Fiona levers Ms. Seabright into sitting position, propping her back with a cushion if she begins to slouch, and spoons boiled vegetables and baby food into her mouth. Upon discovering Ms. Seabright’s original recipes in the bungalow basement, Fiona begins to experiment in the kitchen…
The story is so seductive because of the success of its kaleidoscopic tone. Moments of warmth and light are simultaneously coloured by a continual sense of cold foreboding. Its reader must come equipped with both their good eye and their bad. The odd sentence here and there gives you an undefined certainty that something is wrong.
Gibson hides shadows behind statements. More than linear narratives, she builds collages out of paragraphs, and her prose recolors itself retrospectively.
The very first lines tell us: ‘Fiona had always felt she had a special gift. It wasn’t something that could be scientifically demonstrated, but she knew. Massaging her patients, she’d feel her palms getting warm and she’d imagine a rejuvenating energy flowing from her hands, blue and beaming like underwater lamps on television programs about the deep sea.’ Gibson hides shadows behind statements. More than linear narratives, she builds collages out of paragraphs, and her prose recolors itself retrospectively.
Gibson has undoubtably mastered the art of the Irish goodbye
Another key strength of the collection comes from Gibson’s ability to write a mundane villain; she astutely invokes the loathing we experience everyday – for mansplaining, ignorance, consumptive innocence, hypocrisy – in such vivid intensity that it is both realistic and corruptingly vile. This leaks into her language; every description of a woman from the perspective of the male protagonist in ‘Wild Food’ suggests a sort of cannibalistic consumption, where each detail turns them over in his mouth, appraising the flavor.
Gibson has undoubtably mastered the art of the Irish goodbye; her stories seem to pull out right from underneath you just as you are expecting a crescendo. Yet every ending still feels satiating. Although they do not always reach the resolution you anticipate, Gibson has already lit the rest of the way. Through each slight nod and subtle character detail, we know exactly where to end up when we allow our minds to wander through the remaining blanks – she has always said just enough.
In this way, she has produced not only a brisk, enthralling read ideal for the busy, fast-paced first month of university, but also a breeding ground for the imagination, perfectly suited to get your mind’s whirring.
Ruby Wright
Emily MacLean
Since it’s hardest to put a book down when it feels like you are mid-conversation with someone, somewhere, embarking on the same story, every month we are inviting you to share your own thoughts, and we will select our favourites to publish next month! Send your review through https://forms.gle/z5dkj2H9oNURevhT6 and happy reading!
Featured Image: Epigram / Rosy Brown
Will you pick up a copy of The Good Eye?
